Motorola has announced it is to return to China after being absent from the market since 2013 when it became a Google-owned company. This follows Chinese tech giant Lenovo’s October acquisition of the US-based mobile vendor.

The worldwide smart watch market is set to exceed 5 million units next year, according to research published this week. Apple is rumoured to be readying a smart watch device this year, and estimates suggest that over 330,000 smart watches were shipped in 2012, led by Sony and Motorola, while recent start-up Pebble Technology joined Sony as a market leader in 2013.

Motorola Solutions has made a bid to acquire ruggedized mobile device manufacturer Psion for approximately £128m ($200m). The firm, which is the business remaining after Google acquired its handset business, Motorola Mobility, said it wanted to acquire Psion to strengthen its mobile-computing portfolio with ruggedized handheld products and vehicle-mount terminals.

Intel has used consumer gadget show CES as a platform to declare its arrival to the smartphone market, announcing a multi-year deal with handset maker Motorola Mobility and unveiling a Lenovo handset based on its new Atom processor platform. However, disrupting the current state of the market could prove to be a struggle for the firm, suggests one analyst.

Taiwanese handset vendor HTC has previewed two Windows Phone 7 smartphones to consumers across Europe, ahead of the products’ commercial release in October. The Titan and Radar handsets are the first from HTC to run the latest version of WP7, dubbed Mango.

While Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s handset business brings potentially rich rewards in terms of intellectual property, the search firm must be careful to keep its new employees at a respectable distance, industry analysts have warned.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ search for a willing buyer for a stake in the ailing JV appears to have staggered to a halt, with reports emerging that Nokia and Siemens have agreed to rather invest more of their own cash in an effort to revive the partnership’s fortunes. Reports in the Wall Street Journal suggest that plans to sell a controlling stake in the venture to a consortium including private equity investors were about to fall through, with Reuters quoting telecoms analyst Earl Lum as saying that “Any potential investor would need to see some light at the end of the tunnel with regard to profitability for NSN.”

As Android’s march towards mobile OS domination appears to continue unchecked, device manufacturers are joining the scrum to differentiate themselves from the competition. HTC has joined the ranks of manufacturers increasingly looking to pull in the developers to create device-specific apps, announcing a dev-friendly programme to be launched in parallel with an SDK for its Sense user interface.

Fresh from its recently completed acquisition of Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks has announced technology that will connect existing Motorola GSM base stations to NSN’s Flexi Base Station Controller, giving them a path to 3G and LTE services.

Fresh from its most recent bout of litigation against Motorola, Huawei has announced that it is suing ZTE for patent infringement. The world’s second biggest kit maker has revealed that it is to file suits against its rival in France, Germany and Hungary over what it claims are patent and trademark infringements relating to data card and LTE technologies. In addition, Huawei alleges that ZTE used one of its registered trademarks illegally on some of its data card products.

Motorola Mobility is rumoured to be working on its own mobile operating system based on web technologies such as HTML5, which would make it easier for developers to port Android and Apple applications to its devices.

Nokia Siemens Networks is rumoured to be seeking a renegotiation the terms of its bid to acquire Motorola’s wireless network assets. The planned deal, valued at $1.2bn, has been moving at a glacial pace since its inception in July last year, thanks largely to the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Bureau’s (MOFCOM) reluctance to approve it.

Nokia Siemens Networks has said that its planned acquisition of Motorola’s wireless infrastructure assets will not now complete in the first quarter of this year, as it had previously predicted. The deal had already been pushed back from the fourth quarter of 2010 and NSN is now offering “no further guidance” on when it may be finalised, stressing only that it remains committed to the acquisition.

China Unicom has announced the development of its own smartphone operating system built on a Linux core. The ‘Wophone’ OS, which reports claim will not be based on Android, will run on a new brand of devices which, it is hoped, will help China Unicom expand its handset offering in order to grow demand for its 3G services.

Android’s march towards market dominance continues apace with reports from ABI Research that the collective share of the smartphone market held by Android-based phones has increased from 4 percent to 24 percent in the past year.

Websites are now required by law to gain your consent before applying cookies. We use cookies to improve your
browsing experience. Parts of the website may not work as expected without them. By closing or ignoring this
message, you are consenting to our use of cookies.